


Sc-rrr-ewed

by morrezela



Series: The Cursed Ermine [1]
Category: Supernatural RPF
Genre: Alternate Universe - Animals, Animal Transformation, Crack, Curses, M/M, Zoology, ermines
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-07-23
Updated: 2015-07-23
Packaged: 2018-04-10 20:14:09
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,701
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4405982
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/morrezela/pseuds/morrezela
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Jared is a zookeeper with a soft spot. Jensen is a wounded ermine he takes home to nurse back to health.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Sc-rrr-ewed

Jared’s been accused of being too much of a bleeding heart. His friends say that it’s why he can’t have a serious relationship. They tell him that his preoccupation with making the world a better place is damaging to his love life.

It’s the animals. He knows it is, but every time that he promises that he’ll cut back the funding to the zoo gets cut or there is this really bad case that comes in that he just can’t leave alone and pray for the best.

He works at a rescue zoo. All of their animals come in from circus acts, other zoo closures or property seizures if they hear wind of it before the animals are destroyed. Their animals tend to be injured or old when they come to them, so they don’t have the big ticket sellers that other zoos have. Sure a three toed sloth is cool, but Harry the three legged sloth isn’t such a great sell. Parents don’t want their kids to start crying over all the handicapped animals.

Of course the older ones can be in great health, but they also tend to laze around quite a bit more. Sure tigers are fun, but there is only so long they can keep a person’s attention by lazing about in the sun.

Jared could make better money someplace else. He could work fewer hours and have a chance to trade in his beat up Chevy truck for a new pair of wheels with an ecofriendly fuel system and a chassis that doesn’t start shaking once he goes over fifty-five miles per hour.

But that would mean abandoning all of those animals, and he just can’t do it. He’s got too big of a conscience and too big of a heart. He’d gladly share that heart with another person if he could ever find the right somebody. His friends have tried to set him up on dates, but there is always a large gap between loving animals and loving animals to the point of having an exotic animals license that allows you to build a veterinary office in your house.

And then there are the people who insist that all animals should go free and freak out when they find out that Jared works at a zoo for a living. They never bother to hang around long enough to hear that he does rehabilitate and set free the ones that are healthy and young enough.

But when they get in cases like Peanut the elephant who was raised in captivity and now walks with a limp thanks to a bad road accident when the circus was transporting her, there isn’t much of a choice but to make her as comfortable as possible for the rest of her years. Even if they could find a way to ship her back to Africa, she would never survive in the wild.

Jared doesn’t like to admit it to his friends, but sometimes he just plain prefers the company of animals to any romantic attachments. His right hand is all the companionship he needs if he has to sacrifice his beliefs to get something more substantial.

Whenever he gets to pining away for that special someone, Jared makes himself think about a future where he’s old, grey and flaccid. Fat lot of good having somebody will be then. They wouldn’t even be able to talk much because Jared would be worrying about the squirrels outside of their retirement home window and his wife would be worried about what the bridge club ladies would think or something.

So yeah, Jared has a small porn collection and a couple of toys to while away the hours with. It isn’t a perfect solution, but it’s one he can live with.

Tonight is the kind of night that makes Jared believe in his choice.

Jensen’s paperwork says that he was brought over from Denmark. Why, Jared hasn’t a clue. Jensen is an ermine, and if his obscenely rich owners had wanted a pet, they could’ve gotten a ferret for a lot less hassle. They also could’ve just nabbed one in the states or Canada too. It isn’t like the world’s not crawling with weasels, and that’s if Jared doesn’t count all the guys he’s dated.

Still, Jensen was ‘donated’ by some overly wealthy person that had too many connections for his own good, but not enough sense to realize that having a pet weasel wasn’t quite cool. He dropped Jensen off at the zoo and never looked back.

Jensen’s name was ‘Harry’ when he first came, but as the sloth had been at the zoo longer and probably liked his name, Jared took it upon himself to rename the little guy with something denoting his Scandinavian heritage.

Jensen was fit as a fiddle, if a little chubby, when he first got to the zoo. He looked like the type to just slouch around and beg for food, and at first that was exactly what he did.

Then he got bored. At first he started with preening for the customers. Nuisance pest his species might be called, but he was a hit. Half the staff took to calling him “Little Flirt” instead of his name, and Jared tried not to let it bother him that they wouldn’t call him “Jensen.”

After a while though, Jensen started trying to breakout, and not in the wild animal, make a mad dash for it kind of way. He went from “Little Flirt” to “Little Houdini” because he was caught outside of his area so often without any explanation of how he escaped in the first place.

It was kind of funny and a break from the norm, especially when Jensen started hissing and spitting whenever one of the keepers finally found him and took him back to his safe nesting place. Jared swore that Jensen had ruined his last pair of leather gloves all by himself because he bit Jared so many times.

The escape attempts turned really unfunny the night that Jensen decided he was going to escape by taking a detour through the wolf den. His little shrieks of weasel terror and outrage had clued them into his location, and Jared will never live down his frantic calls to the little guy as he watched from the edge of the wolf cage.

There wasn’t anybody at the zoo foolish enough to get between a wolf and its prey, especially not when that prey was a common ermine, but against the odds, Jensen had come running as Jared’s calls. He bounded through the gate a mere second before Beth the wolf crashed into it from behind.

She had some pretty nasty looking scratches that Jensen had given her, but there was doubt about her alpha dog status. Jensen’s back paw was lifted up off the ground and dripping tiny drops of weasel blood. When Jared picked him up, he hissed but otherwise held still. Jared swore that he could feel the tiny hear beating even through the protective layer of his gloves, but his mind knew that wasn’t possible.

What also wasn’t possible was Jensen having a prolonged stay in the infirmary. There were other animals that needed help, and splinting a renegade ermine’s paw wasn’t exactly a cost effective proposal when the zoo had to run on a tight budget.

But Jared was licensed, and Jensen did a good job at publicity when he actually in his cage doing weasel things for the visitors, so the zoo director let Jared sign the little guy out for rehabilitation attempts.

It’s been three days since Jared brought Jensen back to his tiny home office, and he’s doing great. He hasn’t tried to escape once, but Jared figures that has more to do with his out of commission paw than it does with his new, sweet digs.

But tonight instead of eating down his chow and piteously begging for more, (Jensen eats twice what a normal stoat would and stays skinny; Jared doesn’t know how the previous owners managed to fatten him up) Jensen started playing with the tiny ball toy that Jared left for him in the cage. Back and forth between his front paws he rolled it. Over and over again it jingled until Jared finally gave up looking at his paperwork and crept over to watch him bat it between those tiny paws.

When Jensen noticed that Jared was paying attention to him, he actually started bouncing the ball towards Jared, actually squeaking when the ball kept returning to him instead of reaching its target. It was fascinating behavior, and the scientist in Jared wanted to see what Jensen would do if the ball actually did reach Jared.

If anybody else had been there, they would have told Jared not to let Jensen out of his cage. But nobody else was there, and nobody else cared about Jensen anyway.

Once Jensen was out of his cage, he really hammed it up. There is no other way that Jared can explain it. It was like the world was a stage and Jensen just had the spotlight turned on him. He weasel danced and shimmied even with his injured paw held together by tiny little splints and too large bandages. He squeaked and sputtered and chirruped like he was trying to have a conversation with Jared, and it was sadly one of the best Friday nights that Jared had experienced in a long time.

At the top of every hour, Jared would try to put Jensen back into his tiny cage for some rest, but somehow the little ermine would cajole Jared into letting him stay out a little longer until Jared just gave in and made a makeshift pen around the sofa so that he could watch Jensen and the television at the same time.

Jared had figured that Jensen would continue to play with his ball for a while before he would get bored. After all with no human to watch his antics, his tiny animal brain would move on, right?

Jared’s assumption wasn’t completely wrong. Jensen did get bored with the ball, but instead of spending his time trying to escape Jared’s makeshift barricade, he wobbled over to where Jared was stretched out on the couch, strained into a precarious upright position and proceeded to whine to be picked up.

Sucker that he was, Jared caved. He wouldn’t normally have done it, but again there was nobody there to judge his actions.

So that is how Jared ended up with a very sleepy ermine curled up on his chest purring. It turns out that Jensen loves football. His beady little ermine eyes stay glued to the screen, and his little weasel ears twitch as the announcers do their stupid, macho audio recaps.

It’s hilarious in a way. Jensen is the best date that Jared’s been on in months. He complimented Jared’s cooking, kept him entertained and has good taste in sports. Okay, so the sports thing is in question. Jared had gotten called out for a non-Jensen emergency just before the game came on, and any good fan would’ve already watched it before coming over to Jared’s place.

But Jensen’s an ermine. It isn’t like he’s got TiVo in his den.

It’s stupid of Jared to drift off like he does. Jensen might be partly domesticated, but he’s still not a pet. His bite can be dangerous even to a human. Jared knows better, but Jensen is warm and furry and non-threatening, and Jared goes from awake to asleep with barely a thought.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

The first thing that Jared thinks upon wakening is that he doesn’t want to wake up. Somebody, a guy somebody, is pressing soft kisses to his face and throat. Said guy’s hands are running lightly over his body and said guy’s dick is pressing very nicely against Jared’s dick.

Then Jared’s eyes fly open because:  
One: Jensen is missing.  
Two: There is some strange dude in his house molesting him.  
Three: His priorities might be out of order, and it’ll kill him to admit that to his friends.

Jared shoves strange guy off of him. Strange guy lands with a shriek of pain and a really weird hissing noise.

“What the hell did you do to my ermine?” Jared hears himself say. He’ll look into getting psychological help tomorrow. Maybe his insurance will cover it because of the break in.

“Ja-rrr-ed?” the naked man more chirrups his name out than says it. He’s a very attractive naked assailant. Clearly he could be getting sex from willing partners somewhere. Jared wonders if maybe the guy’s obvious speech impediment has caused him to fall into aberrant behavior patterns.

“Great! You’re stalking me. Tell me where Jensen is, and I’ll ask the cops to go easy on you.”

“I…” the guy looks confused. Then he looks down at his foot. It is broken, that much Jared can tell, but it’s the tiny splinting and bandaging stuck to it that make him want to go attack his alcohol supply.

“Fuck, no,” Jared denies. He might have relationship issues, but he is NOT going crazy. He can’t afford to go crazy. He has bills to pay.

“Ja-rrrrrr-ed!” Naked man cries after him as Jared bolts for the kitchen to dig for his vodka bottle. It’s weird, weird, weird, and he is NOT going back out there until he is officially drunk enough to be seeing things. He figures sexy, naked men will be the least of his problems by then.

Sounds of pain and hissing accompany some loud thumping sounds, so he isn’t surprised when the naked guy wriggles his way onto Jared’s kitchen floor.

“You-rrrr being mean. I can’t get up,” Jensen half says and half squeaks.

“You are not a weasel.” Jared says

“That’s what I told the witch, but she didn’t believe me. She said I was a selfish Ame-rrrr-ican tou-rrrr-ist and a pig. She cu-rrr-sed me into the form of a weasel and said that I could only be changed back if someone could feel t-rrr-ue affection towa-rrr-ds me.”

“So like you’re the Beast?”

Jensen glared at him and said, “I’m gay, and my supposed best f-rrr-iend lied to he-rrrr and got he-rrr to cu-rrr-se me. Then he toted me a-rrr-ound like a pet until he could get his hands on my money and left me to rrr-ot at you-rrr zoo.”

“So all that time you were trying to escape out into the world to find somebody to love you? Wasn’t that kind of a long shot?”

“What would you have done?” Jensen shot back.

“I, uh, okay well. So. The affection thing…”

“Ja-rrr-ed, I’ve been an e-rrr-mine for the past few yea-rrr-s. Rrrr-ight now all I’m looking fo-rrr is some pain meds, a cast and some clothes. I’d also like it to be seve-rrr-al yea-rrr-s befo-rrr-e my hair tu-rrr-ns snow white again.”

Jared can understand that, but there’s the matter of how they woke up. “You were kissing me.”

Jensen blushes and looks down. “Yes? Seve-rrr-al yea-rrr-s as a weasel, Ja-rrr-ed. And you rrr-escued me. I was happy. And you-rrr ve-rrr-y att-rrr-active.”

“Yeah, okay. I get that. Uh, so, clothes, right? And then pain killers and maybe a brace until we get you to a real doctor, and I need to like come up with some paperwork that’ll convince the zoo that you had to be put down. Oh and we need to get you a speech therapist because, dude, that chirring thing is kind of not cool.”

“Don’t make fun of my speech impediment. I’ve had it fo-rrr-eve-rrr.” Jensen tells him.

“Oh, oh man, I am so sorry. I didn’t mean to insult…”

Jensen’s laughter stops Jared cold. “The look on you-rrr face,” he gasps between laughs.

“Yeah, well you did ball tricks for me.” Jared shoots back automatically.

“You liked them. You pathetic ball of mush, I bet you-rrr mothe-rrr could neve-rrr take you into a pet sto-rrr-e.”

Jared throws a towel at him and stalks off to find the guy some clothes. Because quite honestly, the two things that Jared has never been able to resist is an animal in distress and a hot guy.

He is so sc-rrr-ewed.


End file.
